An excerpt from The Future of Human Experience is now online at InnerSelf.com

Agriculture has played a central role through humanity’s long odyssey on Earth. How we use or abuse the Earth’s natural systems determines, in part, whether we will flourish or not. Supporting life requires the growing of food crops worldwide, meaning that agricultural restoration can become the foundation for improving our global community’s ecosystems and human health.

One available tool is biodynamic farming, which offers us a way to both cherish the Earth and attend to the process of growing foods and raising animals properly. According to activist and CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) owner and educator Allan Balliett, biodynamic farming is “a spiritual approach to growing.” Biodynamic farmers “try to take into account all of the forces that affect plant growth and their nutritional value.”

In 1924 Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), Austrian educator, esoteric scientist and originator of anthroposphy and the Waldorf School System, gave a series of lectures near the end of his life, resulting from his concern that foods didn’t taste as good as they did when he was a boy. Steiner was concerned about the depletion of soil quality because of the use of chemicals, which can be traced to about the year 1900 in that area. As Balliett pointed out, “It’s amazing to realize that as far back as then, a hundred years ago, people were already seeing the dramatic change in . . . the taste and quality of foods as a result of their introduction of chemical farming, which was beginning to replace the ancient and well-proven system of peasant farming.”

Read the whole excerpt online at InnerSelf.com